The songs that are stuck in my head

Open gathering and chat post!

This "Christmas season" is hard on everyone -- even those who enjoy & celebrate it can find it exhausting. And for those of us who don't -- or can't -- celebrate it (for whatever reason) it can be especially isolating -- particularly for those of us whose primary social connections happen through these here Interwebs.

So:

I'm posting this entry as an open discussion/chat thread, so that we have a place to chat and commune through the comment threads.

Come sip a warm (or cool, depending on your season) spiced beverage of your choosing, and grab a plate full of virtual goodies.

I'll be checking back in frequently over the next 72 hours or so.

Welcome! Welcome!

Edited to add:

I also can't forget (or, rather, I can, but should not) that today is also the first day of Hanukkah. So have a video that ysabetwordsmith posted a couple of years ago:

Oh, pretty good... I took a shower this morning while my hard drive defragmented (day before yesterday, my sound driver decided not to work any more, so I had to do a system restore back to October 1 -- since then, my computer's clock has been insisting that Greenwich Mean Time is an hour earlier than it actually is, so I had to reset my clock to one timezone further east, and my C: drive was 4% fragmented -- but all the fragments were right at the beginning of the drive, so moving my mouse from one side of the screen to the other was causing a low memory fault).

So far, I'm reinstalling Java in the attempt to make Minecraft work. If it does start working again, I'm gonna find a Great Big Space and build a Great Big Castle, I think. I haven't played Minecraft seriously for ages, I hear there are Many New Things to play with!

Clearly, all possible combinations of coffee and cocoa and other hot drinks that blend well with those should be tried, separately and in combination, until one arrives at The Ultimate Holiday Beverage.

(This was a hobby of mine at one point, in fact...I may pick it back up again.)

Coffee with milk, oranges, a candy-cane. Need to put together some real food soon, and then go wrap things.

I need to learn how to host things (as an intovert!) in self-defense.

(dotdotdot for relatives and holiday stress)

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Right now I'm feeling glad and grateful with a side-order of worried, because an old family friend dropped by with her partner and we had a good chat, but with some things unsaid. (I'm at my parent's house for the holidays, along with my sister; we're all pretty okay with each other, no major traumatic history, but there is still occasional friction which has serious layers because it's evolved over our entire lives.)

Earlier, I was feeling frazzled and wrong-footed and panicky, plus guilty and awkward, with an awkward wedge of gratitude in there somewhere. I lit a candle in my room for personal spiritual purposes, but my mother had previously asked me not to, and someone came in and took the candle at some point after I fell asleep, and it weirded me out and now I remember why I lived with a locked door as a teenager even though I like and trust my family, because they don't know how to talk to me instead of just...assuming they know what's what. Then before that, I was feeling so cozy...and before that, oh, I don't even know.

And now we're debating eggnog recipes and what to use up out of the fridge. *facepalm* My mother will never, ever, ever believe that if there is leftover cream, I will drink it in my coffee and this is not a problem. Nor that planning and picking recipes to use things up now mean one shouldn't be trying to save enough eggs to still have some of those on hand to maybe use later.

I like a lot of word games. Among them are Scrabble, Boggle, Bananagrams and so on. There are manymany online options for these. But for playing right here in a comment thread, one of the old verbal or scratch pad travel games might be best...hmmm...

Well, there is one-word-at-a-time storytelling, that's an old car trip game. Comment with one word at a time with dotdotdot, and when you think the sentence is done, comment with a punctuation mark. (Explanation here: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/5-word-related-car-games-for-your-next-road-trip/ ) There isn't a win condition to the basic form of the game, but a possible group objective is to make the longest possible grammatical sentence that makes sense and stays on topic, without repeating a word.

I'll start us off with a header and the first comment. if anyone wants to play.

Oh, PS, since we have an indefinite number of participants, it's fine to drop by over and over, just let two other people go in between each comment by the same person, unless things seem to be stalling out. And capriuni is in charge and can change the rules.

Hooray for writing! I've been enjoying the fresh clips of "Raze" you've been posting... In the personal writing sphere, I've actually decided to revise and polish this year's NaNoWriMo project (which was also 2012's project -- the last NaNoWriMo I completed), probably during Camp Nano, this year, mostly.

I'm having "A season" -- my aide/housemate isn't much for observations, either public or private; I think she prefers to just ignore them. So I fly solo on all celebrations.